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Voyager 1 Finds Unexpected Wrinkles At the Edge Of the Solar System
Voyager 1 has been close to the boundary of the solar system for quite a while; we've mentioned that the edge is near a few times before, including an evidently premature report in 2010 that Voyager had reached a distance so far from the sun that it could no longer detect solar winds and another in 2011 that it had reached an "outer shell" of solar influence. It turns out that the boundaries of the solar system are fuzzier than once anticipated; the L.A. Times is reporting that "Toward the end of July 2012, Voyager 1's instruments reported that solar winds had suddenly dropped by half, while the strength of the magnetic field almost doubled, according to the studies. Those values then switched back and forth five times before they became fixed on Aug. 25. Since then, solar winds have all but disappeared, but the direction of the magnetic field has barely budged." Also at Wired, which notes "That's hard to explain because the galaxy's magnetic field is thought to be inclined 60 degrees from the sun's field. No one is entirely sure what's going on. ... [It's] almost as if Voyager thought it was going outside but instead found itself standing in the foyer of the sun's home with an open door that allows wind to blow in from the galaxy."
Obligatory XKCD
Unexpected? You didn't think something 4.5 billion years old would have a few wrinkles?
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Someone else (who I think I saw here on Slashdot the last time Voyager was mentioned) had a great analogy for what we're likely seeing. I can't take credit for this at all, but I think it makes a lot of sense.
Suppose we're a small probe, making our way off an island, down the beach, and into the ocean. All we have is a wind-speed detector, and a water detector. As we near the water, waves start lapping over us. When they do, our wind-speed detector says "no wind", and our water detector says "we're wet." Have we entered the ocean yet? The answer is "not quite, but we're really darn close."
It doesn't seem surprising to me at all that the boundary neither perfectly uniform, nor stationary in time. I think we'll be in this transition band for a while.
Program Intellivision!
Our galaxy is 120,000 light years across. Voyager is currently traveling 38,100 miles per hour, or 1/17600 the speed of light. As such, just to cross our galaxy, it would take 211.2 Million years. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.54 Million light years away. Or if it were pointed towards Andromeda (it's not), it would take 44.7 Billion years to get there. Even traveling at Voyager speeds to Proxima Centari (our nearest star) would take 17600 years to get there. To recap, space is big... Really big.
Thirty four characters live here.
You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You do realize that, until very recently, all these creationists were split rather equally between both dems and reps. (The gay marriage and abortion issue pushed white evangelists into the Reps side.) The black population is over 50% creationist (and 90+ are dems) and almost 50% of those who classify themselves as liberal are creationists.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/who-are-the-creationists-by-the-numbers/#.UdBCoDu1H4s
Another thing to think about is that all creationists are not the same. There are they young earthers as well as those who accept that the earth is billions of years old but who think that God created life (and accept minor evolutionary change).
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
You are not separate from the universe, you're part of it. One of many entities that allows the universe to observe and talk to itself. - Sagan (paraphrased).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You must be joking. Why on earth would you use a complicated OS like Linux for something that just has to do one very particular job? And then have some hacker take control of it because they found a vulnerability in one of the services the probe was never intended to use anyway? Or the software crash because of some mysterious bug in some library written by some guy in his parents' basement 10 years ago?
I remember video players (tapes, early discs) that would start playing pretty much immediately after you switched them on. Nowadays, you switch on a DVD/blueray player and you get "Welcome" for about 20 seconds. Then the thing crashes every now and then so it needs a reboot. Yep, it's running some flavor of Linux. If you need reliability and efficiency, I'll take 70's technology any time.
Just program the thing directly for whatever it needs to do, using proprietary code. The code will be 1% the size and a lot more efficient.
(Not that I don't like Linux, by the way. It's great for general purpose equipment where you might actually need all of those capabilities)